Update May 13, 2021
Editor's Note: The following is adapted from the author's book, Digital & Marketing Asset Management: The Real Story of DAM Technology & Practice published by Rosenfeld Media and copyrighted by Real Story Group.
Since the turn of the millennium, digital media types have become more and more an important part of our daily experiences. Every day, we use and interact with photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, interactive ads, online movies and even experiential marketing, gaining a technical advantage numbers with the rise of virtual and augmented reality.
This digital media boom is driven by a combination of trends and innovations: inexpensive, high-functioning digital and digital cameras (even part of a device). mobile device); increase network bandwidth; reduce storage costs; low cost, high performance processor; high capacity, solid state memory; affordable cloud services; and the necessary digital media infrastructure.
Navigating all these digital media creates challenges for consumers as well as businesses.
Consumers want to organize the experience and consumption of digital media files. They want to be able to find them, categorize them, and use them when and where they want – and they want to do all of this across multiple devices.
Meanwhile, businesses and content marketers have similar but much broader wish lists. Of course, they want to be able to easily find your property , but most commonly, they want to use digital media “products” to reach potential customers. They may use digital assets as part of a marketing campaign to reach a specific audience in a specific form, such as digital or physical documents, email promotions , movie trailer or website landing page. Digital media can be the product itself – a music collection, TV series online , video electronic magazine, eBooks or category – distributed in a variety of formats or forms.
To produce these products, you need to create, organize, find, and use pieces of digital media: not just the individual images, graphics, photos, video segments, and audio files that make up elements of your product, but also layout, editing, and design files that provide structure. In most cases, you'll also need to add textual information, such as copy, description, and product data. In the end, you have to put everything together in the right format in the production process Specifically or workflow.
Once done, you want to deliver and track all of the product's components, as well as any changes or versions over time. In addition (if that's not enough), many digital files have restrictions and rights must be supervised and respected .
And here, dear reader, is the salient feature of digital asset management .
Businesses and content marketers need to manage each part of their brand story, campaign or product independently or in addition to managing the whole thing.
Marketers should manage each part of the brand story independently and as part of the whole, @TheresaRegli said via @CMIContent @sitecore. Click to Tweet The management of this digital media throughout its existence has been the general domain of digital asset management.
What is Digital Asset Management?
As a discipline and technology, DAM is all about control, flexibility, portability, access and reporting of digital assets between organizations, customers, partners and vendors. (Digital assets are files that have intrinsic value or are acquired over their lifetime.)
DAM is interested in delivering the right content to the right people, across all devices, primarily in real time, with the ability to track and measure digital asset engagement within a business. industry and its global reach.
Technically, digital assets are more than just media files. To realize the value of a file (or collection of files), you need more information about it. In short, you need metadata.
For most DAM purposes, content is defined as media content plus its metadata. This metadata can be as simple as the name, author, or creation date of the file, or as complex as the rights and fees surrounding the use of images or extracted speech converted to text from the video. Content becomes usable content only when metadata is associated with it.
# Content becomes usable property only when metadata is associated with it, @TheresaRegli said via @CMIContent @sitecore. #Content Strategy Click to Tweet Metadata are needed to curate these, providing useful information about the content, such as: “Older woman holding baby, photo, taken by Phil Smith, January 5, 2008.” This information makes content accessible and searchable, provides context, defines usage rights, displays the content's usage history, and over time can be used to determine the value of the content. content.
ADVERTISEMENT 
A pocket guide to the connected content lifecycle
Data, insights, resources, funnels, segments, UX, CX… to keep your content relevant throughout its entire lifecycle depends on many different factors. Sitecore is here to help you understand how to build a content supply chain that brings these elements together and makes a digital difference. Download Pocket guide to learn how to get started.
What does the DAM system do?
Although DAM is first and foremost a discipline, it is also a Technology. In its simplest form, a digital asset management system provides a secure repository that facilitates the creation, management, organization, production, distribution, and monetization of media files. Convenience is identified as a digital asset.
Like other content management technologies, DAM systems provide basic library services: a common (usually centralized) and secure place to store, organize, and retrieve files. It also provides core process services, including specific facilities for managing, manipulating, converting, securing, moving, and processing multimedia files and their metadata. Most DAM systems are now able to integrate with other tools and systems that, for a content marketer, can be especially helpful. There is no doubt that you are accessing the correct or up-to-date version of the logo or content.
How does DAM fit into the bigger picture?
It is not always clear. Choose the right tool For comprehensive and effective digital marketing is no different than concocting a complex cocktail: You have to find the right mix of ingredients in the right balance proportions that work for you. What works for one organization may not work for you, like one person likes martinis and another likes black liquor. Both drinks contain vermouth, just like the two institutions may have DAM systems – but mixing with other ingredients means the results can be quite different.
As a digital marketer, you need to think of yourself as your business's technology mixologist, working with your colleagues to come up with the right mix. While DAM is clearly on your ingredient list, it's equally important to understand the role each technology plays, as well as different potential priorities or goals that other users may have. Otherwise, your cocktail will end up in a mess in the glass and no one will return to your bar.
Digital marketers are enterprise technology mixologists, finding the right blend for a great drink, @TheresaRegli via @CMIContent @sitecore. #Content Strategy Click to Tweet
How does DAM work within the framework of digital marketing?
While the term "digital marketing technology" (or "martech") is commonly used in the industry, marketers often disagree on what it means. Collectively, digital marketing technology is the set (another cocktail, anyone?) of digital systems that marketers use to collect, nurture, and nurture leads and customers.
Traditionally, these systems reflect how a marketer wants to represent a brand or product line. However, as marketing becomes (or aspires to be) more customer-centric , marketers increasingly feel that new approaches must focus more on customer preferences – including their browsing and purchase history – and satisfy them in the channel of their choice. (mobile, in-store, catalog or other channels). Digital assets are instrumental in realizing this plan.
The most obvious example is ad tracking: when someone browses through a product on one website only to see a promotion or banner ad for the same item on another website hours later. there. Not all potential customers appreciate this type of retargeting because it sometimes seems like a sales assistant is chasing them down the street after they've left the store. But it's not just advertising content. DAM technology can assist other systems in personalizing the content provided to returning visitors based on their previous activity.
Top performing organizations have realized that superior customer experience is intrinsically tied to the quality of their digital channels. And companies that sell physical products are increasingly combining efficiency and effectiveness between the in-store shopping experience and digital shopping (multichannel marketing). With the right content and metadata, and a well-mixed cocktail of DAM and martech, it should be able to serve targeted content to potential customers as well as customers.
The top performers see superior customer experience as intrinsically tied to digital channel quality, @TheresaRegli via @CMIContent @sitecore. Click to Tweet At its core, this is the value of DAM: If you do it right, your wealth is The target is ready . They have the right metadata to update the right content and target customers most effectively. And that should make any content marketer's job easier.
A version of this article originally appeared in the February issue of Content Director . Register to get a free CCO subscription.
Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute
Post a Comment
Post a Comment